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The Map of Regrets
Print Edition
ISBN
978-619-02-1442-7
Price
17.80 lv.
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Information
Rating (7)
4.85714285714 7
Language
Bulgarian
Format
Paperback
Size
13/20
Weight
146 gr.
Pages
144
Published
12 July 2024

The Map of Regrets

Nathalie Skowronek’s La Carte des regrets (The Map of Regrets), one of the winners of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, is the story of Véronique, a charismatic editor at a Paris publishing house who is found dead in the woods far from her Paris home. It is the story of the two men in her life who loved her: Daniel, her husband, her rock, her family; and Titus, her lover, her muse, her soulmate. And it is the story of her daughter Mina, left motherless at the tender age of twenty-one, fully grown but not yet mature, discovering the hidden, imperfect life of the mother she thought she knew.

Each of these people struggle to piece together ‘their’ Véronique in the wake of the discovery that there were facets of the woman — mother, wife and lover — that she hid from them all. As the quiet, gentle story is unveiled, we gain an insight into the subtlety, the moral grey areas and the paradoxes of family life and loyalty. We gradually grow to understand the conflicted woman whose death no one could have prevented, yet which has cast shockwaves through the lives of those she knew intimately.

The novel also touches upon the theme of art — its ephemerality and its eternality. Art as remembrance and as a connection with our ancestors and loved ones. Véronique, when alive, was fascinated by 19th-century Flemish artist Jeroen Herst and his delicate landscapes evoking rivers and seas. Titus, for his part, uses his documentary film about Herst to uncover and honour the Véronique he knew and loved.

Nathalie Skowronek’s portrait of a woman torn between her two lovers, unable to abandon her family nor lay aside the shackles of expectation and duty, is no less tenderly and sensitively painted. This slip of a book is quiet and melancholy, philosophical and introspective. It tackles the universal themes of loss and love in all its forms. All the while, it begs the question: What do we owe our loved ones? And what do they owe us? Can we truly know those close to us?

This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.

Creative Europe Programme

About the Author
Nathalie  Skowronek

Nathalie Skowronek was born in Brussels in 1973. After studying literature, she worked in publishing before going into women’s fashion for 7 years. She returned to literature in 2004, when she created the editor collection La Plume et le Pinceau for the publishing house Complexe.

At the age of 37, she published her first novel, Karen et moi (Arléa, 2011), the first volume of a family trilogy which takes the reader from the Polish shtetls on the road to Auschwitz. Two novels, Max, en apparence (Arléa, 2013) and Un monde sur mesure (Grasset, 2017), followed. In 2015, she published an essay entitled La Shoah de Monsieur Durand (Gallimard,2015), in which she shows that duty of remembrance ceases to operate after 70 years.

Since 2016, she has been teaching in the Contemporary Writing Centre of La Cambre/École nationale supérieure des arts visuels. She also facilitates a writing workshop for the Antonin Artaud Club, a day centre for adults with psychological disabilities.

Print Edition
Print Edition
ISBN
978-619-02-1442-7
Buy
Price
17.80 lv.
(20.00 lv.)

* 11% online discount
Shipping - Speedy / Bulgaria, Bulgarian Posts / abroad
Free shipping in Bulgaria for orders above 80 lv.
-11%
Discount
Shipping
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